Center for Advanced Study of Language Research Works

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/11610

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End date: 2009

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Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    A Method for Stopping Active Learning Based on Stabilizing Predictions and the Need for User-Adjustable Stopping
    (Association for Computational Linguistics, 2009-06) Bloodgood, Michael; Vijay-Shanker, K
    A survey of existing methods for stopping active learning (AL) reveals the needs for methods that are: more widely applicable; more aggressive in saving annotations; and more stable across changing datasets. A new method for stopping AL based on stabilizing predictions is presented that addresses these needs. Furthermore, stopping methods are required to handle a broad range of different annotation/performance tradeoff valuations. Despite this, the existing body of work is dominated by conservative methods with little (if any) attention paid to providing users with control over the behavior of stopping methods. The proposed method is shown to fill a gap in the level of aggressiveness available for stopping AL and supports providing users with control over stopping behavior.
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    Taking into Account the Differences between Actively and Passively Acquired Data: The Case of Active Learning with Support Vector Machines for Imbalanced Datasets
    (Association for Computational Linguistics, 2009-06) Bloodgood, Michael; Vijay-Shanker, K
    Actively sampled data can have very different characteristics than passively sampled data. Therefore, it’s promising to investigate using different inference procedures during AL than are used during passive learning (PL). This general idea is explored in detail for the focused case of AL with cost-weighted SVMs for imbalanced data, a situation that arises for many HLT tasks. The key idea behind the proposed InitPA method for addressing imbalance is to base cost models during AL on an estimate of overall corpus imbalance computed via a small unbiased sample rather than the imbalance in the labeled training data, which is the leading method used during PL.
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    An Approach to Reducing Annotation Costs for BioNLP
    (Association for Computational Linguistics, 2008-06) Bloodgood, Michael; Vijay-Shanker, K
    There is a broad range of BioNLP tasks for which active learning (AL) can significantly reduce annotation costs and a specific AL algorithm we have developed is particularly effective in reducing annotation costs for these tasks. We have previously developed an AL algorithm called ClosestInitPA that works best with tasks that have the following characteristics: redundancy in training material, burdensome annotation costs, Support Vector Machines (SVMs) work well for the task, and imbalanced datasets (i.e. when set up as a binary classification problem, one class is substantially rarer than the other). Many BioNLP tasks have these characteristics and thus our AL algorithm is a natural approach to apply to BioNLP tasks.
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    Rapid Adaptation of POS Tagging for Domain Specific Uses
    (Association for Computational Linguistics, 2006-06) Miller, John; Bloodgood, Michael; Torii, Manabu; Vijay-Shanker, K
    Part-of-speech (POS) tagging is a fundamental component for performing natural language tasks such as parsing, information extraction, and question answering. When POS taggers are trained in one domain and applied in significantly different domains, their performance can degrade dramatically. We present a methodology for rapid adaptation of POS taggers to new domains. Our technique is unsupervised in that a manually annotated corpus for the new domain is not necessary. We use suffix information gathered from large amounts of raw text as well as orthographic information to increase the lexical coverage. We present an experiment in the Biological domain where our POS tagger achieves results comparable to POS taggers specifically trained to this domain.
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    Joint Grammar Development by Linguists and Computer Scientists
    (2008) Maxwell, Michael; David, Anne
    For languages with inflectional morphology, development of a morphological parser is often a bottleneck for further development of computational linguistic capabilities. We focus on two difficulties: first, finding people with expertise in both computer programming and the linguistics of a particular language, and second, the short lifetime of software such as parsers. We then describe a methodology we have developed to split the task of building a parser for a language into two tasks, descriptive grammar development and formal grammar development. The two grammars are combined into a single document using Literate Programming. The formal grammar is designed not to be dependent on a particular parsing engine’s programming language, so that it can be readily ported to a new parsing engine, thus helping solve the software lifetime problem.
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    Interoperable Grammars
    (2008) Maxwell, Michael; David, Anne
    For languages with significant inflectional morphology, development of a morphological parser is often a prerequisite to further computational linguistic capabilities. We focus on two difficulties for this development: the short lifetime of software such as parsing engines, and the difficulty of porting grammars to new parsing engines. We describe a methodology we have developed to promote portability, using a formal declarative grammar written in XML, which we supplement with a traditional descriptive grammar. The two grammars are combined into a single document using Literate Programming. The formal grammar is designed to be independent of a particular parsing engine’s programming language, thus helping solve the software lifetime and portability problems.